Feeble Salsa Dancing & Dangerous SUVs

Today was pretty much the best day ever, despite a lot of sweating like a proverbial hooker in church & a minor fall.


I worked for my catering job and Northeastern today. Basically I just chilled out with fun staff who had multiple danceoffs and got to bring home a bouquet.

After that, I biked around the South End, which I realized was an area I didn't know that well. I wanted to hate it for being totally gentrified, except it was so damn cute that it was nearly impossible. Little brownstones and parks and sidewalk cafés...

On the way home I had an incident that made me feel like a true Bostonian cyclist. I got doored, ie someone opened their door and hit me. I almost stopped in time/only caught the very very corner, so I almost didn't even fall. No major injuries, just 2 tiny bruises. And of course I was wearing a helmet, so that was good. Honestly, I've had worse falls down the stairs. So so so lucky. But seriously, lady, if you weren't driving a BIG ASS SUV (So 2000), there would have been room for me to go by in the bike lane and you to open your door. Get that crap off the road already!

Tonight, I went with my friend Suzanne and some of her salsa dancing compañeros to Salsa Abajo de las Estrellas, a weekly free outdoor salsa dancing extravaganza.  So much amazing dancing. I think I figured why I am such a terrible salsa dancer: I can't move my hips without forgetting the steps, and producing those two movements simultaneously is fairly crucial. It was so fun though: you can't help but be happy while listening to salsa. 

It also kind of negated my previous point about the South End. We were gathered in a park right next to Villa Victoria, a crucial center of Puerto Rican culture and activism, and there was an amazing cross section of people who showed up for the event. Keeping culture alive, reinterpreting it, reviving it, sharing it, through movement and music. What could be more beautiful?

Side news: An article about an awareness event the Guatemala radio network is having made it into the Guatemalan press! Perhaps I will translate the article at some point for y'all, google translate obscured too much of the meaning.
http://www.lahora.com.gt/index.php/nacional/guatemala/departamental/3581-buscan-aprobacion-de-ley-de-medios-de-comunicacion-comunitaria

I had a dream last night that I went on a fact finding mission with the members of Cultural Survival to draw attention to the plight of a group of indigenous peoples. I can't remember "where" though.  Triple nerd score.

Brief reflections on my bookcase and the system that produced it

O hey there insomnia, really missed you. I swear, I haven't been this mentally restless since sophomore year of college.

So my bookshelf sits across from my bed and after staring at it for a while, I decided to inspect it further.

A rough and unscientific survey of the contents:

Poetry: 4 volumes. All male. 2x communist womanizer Pablo Neruda
Music: The Rough Guide to Jazz. This is the only book I have that remotely deals with the African American experience. Embarrassing.
Literature:
So many dudes. Whiny dudes.
"I want 'my' desert back" Edward Abbey- Desert Solitaire
"Being wealthy during the Pinochet Years is such a drag that all I can do is get high "Alberto Fuguet- Mala Onda
"I just got a noble prize for coopting Mayan imagery" Hombres de Maíz- Asturías (to be fair, he wrote unbelievably well)
"Let's have a cross continental bohemian romp" Rayuelas- Julio Cortázar
Economics: 4 volumes. If you count the Euro-enamored"Wealth and Poverty of Nations" and "Small is Beautiful."
Latin America: This part of my collection has a lot of breadth. But all expat academics, minus a lone Chilean author, Manuel Antonio Garretón.
South Asia/Middle East: All written by outsiders. 1 book about the Shi'ia, 1 about Islamic art & 1 alarmist/ing? view of Pakistan's nuclear program
Africa: According to my book shelf, Africa is nothing more than child soldiers & the legacy of Belgian genocide in the Congo. Cue the sad music and NGO pleas for money. Shameful.
Europe/Former USSR: Chernobyl. What a downer. 
Asia: Huh? Where's that?

I was shocked to realize I only own 2 books written by women. "Wasted" is about a woman's struggles with anorexia. The other is a male voiced narrative of spiritual journey in Spain.

Using my bookcase as a metric, it's visually apparent that the university does some things well: expose us to a wide variety of topics and shape more specific interests. What it doesn't do well: expose us to non-white, non-western, non-male views. Or let the inhabitants of different regions speak for themselves. To a certain extent, this isn't really academia's fault as much as it is the myriad legacies that led to disparities in education and investigation of the problems of the other rather than engagement with one's own society.

But it does really explain why I am only becoming more truly aware of my white privilege 3 years into my college education (a lack of consciousness that of itself represents tremendous privilege).

I/we have a long long way to go.

TED Talk: Language Diversity Matters!

Cultural capitalism?

Chanced across this again today- been meaning to repost for a while.

Quote of a hot hot hot day*

*Not actually related to the weather.

"To understand the extent, reality, and sacred nature of the rights of the person without destroying society, without fracturing it to atoms: such is the most difficult social goal."

-Alexander Herzen, quoted by Tzvetan Todorov in "The Conquest of the America: The Question of the Other"

Quote of the day

"We need to rigorously explore the ways our interventions as 'white people saving brown people from slightly less- brown people' may maintain colonialist- style relations, may blind us to difference among these people and are integral to consolidating a subject-position as gringa."
A Finger in the Wound: Body Politics in Quincentennial Guatemala, Diane Nelson


Damn straight. I (and probably every NGO ever) totally needed someone to remind me of this. To deconstruct the anthrobabble, she's arguing that the act of intervening is how foreigners in Latin America consolidate our identity in that context aka "gringa"

Dirty Water, Hard Partying Armenians & 235 Years of Rugged Individualism

Happy Fourth of July! As my independence day celebrations generally tend to be amusing, I figured I would recount this weekend.

On Saturday, some friends & I were going to go to Haymarket to the market to get vegetables, but then we rerouted and decided to go kayaking on the Charles! We had the best weather imaginable so it was a great adventure. Renting kayaks from Paddleboston, based out of Kendall Square, is actually quite affordable, at $18/hr for a double or $12 for a single cockpit, $1 drysack rental. A nice spot of exercise with fabulous views of Boston for about the same price as going to the movies. After that we never really made it over to Haymarket, but we walked back through Cambridge/Somerville, encountering a wild turkey yet failing to encounter the Union Square Farmer's Market. O well. That night, we had a bbq/fire pit which slowly devolved to the point where we were chilling on a porch with the 2 Irishmen who are subletting from one of my friends, trying to get them to remember our names and make their jokes slightly less offensive to women. Typical night for Slummerville, I suppose. The firepit was awesome though.

 On Sunday, I refused to do anything productive all day except read Kim Barker's "Taliban Shuffle" (still haven't totally digested how I feel about it) until I went to a catering around 8. I thought it rather odd that a dinner was starting that late, especially since it was a holiday weekend, but it made more sense eventually. Apparently, it was for an Armenian Awards Convention of some sort. I'm not entirely sure the details because all the posters were in Armenian. At least initially, I ended up serving food to the room they had set aside for all the kids, which was a terrible idea because it got rather rowdy. I felt like I was in a video game- dodging small fast moving objects while trying to get to a certain point. Or maybe babysitting. Definitely not your run of the mill catering experience. Kids running around, all the gorgeous adults drunk, a bunch of people making loud speeches in Armenian, a hooded religious figure, kitchen staff creepin' (Señorita, I love you!): it was rather chaotic. Dios mio.

Things got even more wild once they started blasting music with a live band. It reminded me of a Bollywood score, speed up, with extra string instruments thrown in for good measure. Eventually, everyone was dancing in a circle and then all these guys started breakdancing and then dancing with carrying men on their shoulders AND carrying another guy around the waist. Then they started waving various flags. By this point, it looked more like a mob celebrating election results than what I'm used to as a dance party. Quite unexpected but a good reminder that life is to be enjoyed. a lot.

So then it was time for independence day. I decided to be nice to America and spend a day without criticizing stuff, which is hard because pretty much all i do is read about reasons one should criticize american power and influence. (We know you can be better!!!) But anyway, turned off my brain & threw on some red white n blue & went to a bbq (i ate veggie burgers though).  Then we watched fireworks over the Charles which were AMAZING. it was quite good & far more laid back than my all night partying yeah yeah Chilean independence day. but 2 independence days in twelve months? Maybe I should make that happen more often.

can't get you out of my head

Happy song!

MEXICO 2/11 | The Plastics Revolution | Saturno - Light Of Day - Money Talks | A Take Away Show from La Blogotheque on Vimeo.


Why am I awake right now? Today was my day to sleep in! it's ok though, this music makes me want to do happy awake things!